Got an old iMac!

The nice ACM guys handed me an old iMac today! Thank you so much! :-) So now I can finally add a (permanent) PowerPC machine to my park of weird architectures for the compilers course.

Future students beware: You'll have to write a backend for a *real* machine, and we'll roll dice to determine the architecture you'll have to do it for. So far I have MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC, ARM, and of course x86. I need to find at least one more so I can roll a D6. :-)

I'll try to install NetBSD on it tomorrow, I just have to find a USB mouse somewhere that I can use for a few hours. The harder thing will be to cross-compile NetBSD-current and get it on the box, we'll see how long that'll take.

Update 2008/09/29: They actually handed me another iMac last Friday, I just forgot to post about it. I've not played with the new one yet (actually it's older than the old one, but anyways :-)).

The one I got initially now works fine under NetBSD 4.0, still working on getting NetBSD-current on it. Two problems: First the console driver sucks, so text output to the console is super-slow. Second the screen doesn't blank off, so now I need to find some way of at least moving a textual cube around to save the screen. Also, since the screen doesn't switch off, the thing gets pretty darn hot. Oh well...

Update 2011/10/09: Turns out that I got rid of most of these old PowerPC machines during my recent move from the 3rd floor to the 2nd floor of NEB. In the meantime I had replaced most of my physical machines with virtual ones anyway, so there was really no reason anymore to keep them. Also, I still have some trusty G5 servers, so there's still PowerPC hardware in my new office, just not any of the machines I talked about in this old post.